Social Panoramas, Identity and Therapy

Social Panoramas, Identity and Therapy. This online training program represents a meeting of minds between Andrew T. Austin and Lucas Derks.

In their clinical practices, Austin and Derks have both explored psychotherapy focusing on the aspects of identity. Working for many years independently of each other and largely ignorant of each other's existence they began to arrive at some surprisingly similar conclusions when it came to creating expertise in psychotherapeutic change.

They met for the first time in 2011 in Boulder, Colorado when they were both invited by Steve and Connirae Andreas to present at their annual Advanced Mastery Training. From that time, Derks and Austin have exchanged and developed ideas to further their work.

"It seems strange to me that so much of modern psychotherapy has become fixated on exploring how people feel rather than who they are. Changing feelings is easy enough to do, just give your client a nice cup of tea and oodles of kind attention but this is usually only temporary and is what I like to call 'cheap and cheerful change.' Working therapeutically with identity produces a much more stable and longer lasting therapeutic change. For practitioners, understanding identity change requires a deep understanding and quite a lot of hard work..." Andrew T. Austin

Lucas Derks, famous for his work in Social Panoramas and identity, says in answer to the question of what Social Panoramas work can achieve:

"Expel evil spirits! Rebuild the foundations of people's model of the social world. Change the place people believe is theirs in society. Break nasty identification patterns. Help people see themselves as equal to others: help them to create positive self-images. And doing this very directly, from understanding how people create social problems and how people may change them for better social constructions." Lucas Derks

Working with identity may well seem strange to many NLP practitioners and hypnotherapists who are usually more familiar with working with "state" (i.e. feelings). Identity is something that is so often overlooked, along with status games and Social Panoramas. This is something that Derks and Austin seek to change with projects such as Identity Panorama.

Who is Lucas Derks?

Psychotherapist, social psychologist, artist, musician, author and described by Andrew T. Austin as, "The cleverest man I have ever met", Most widely known for his work in social panoramas, Lucas Derks was born on November 19, 1950, and lives in Holland. From 1973 up to 1976 he was teaching drawing and painting at the `De Werkschuit' Zeist/Bilthoven. He followed a didactical training. From the age of ten onward, his talent in the visual arts had been the guiding line. He was mainly painting in oil and tempera: solo exposition in 1980 and 1983. It's brilliant stuff, you can see some of his work here: Lucas's art on Facebook.

From approximately 1970 onward he developed a strong interest in psychology and started a full time study social psychology in 1976; completing his master's degree in 1982. Spending six months in Africa during his university years he completed his thesis on pragmatism. He became acquainted with the work of Bandler and Grinder (NLP) in March 1977.

He followed this in 1983 an NLP practitioner's training with the New York Training Institute for NLP; 1985 NLP masters training at the Institute for Eclectic Psychology in Nijmegen Holland.

From 1980 to 1986 also working as a researcher for several important Dutch art museums (Het Rijksmuseum; Het Centraal museum, Van Gogh museum; Maritiem museum Prins Hendrik) subject: Visitor behaviour at large expositions.

In 1986 he chose to devote himself exclusively to NLP and related things. Then he co-founded The William James Foundation, that was dissolved in 2006. He published a novel that was won an award in 1992 and followed with another novel in 2009.

Lucas wrote seven psychology books. He teamed up with the Dutch NLP trainers Jaap Hollander and Anneke Durlinger.

Ever since he has been doing free-lance jobs as a trainer at the Stichting voor Educatieve en Therapeutische Hypnose; SON Opleidingen BV te Eindhoven; Instituut voor Eclectische Psychologie and many other places in the Netherlands, Belgium, France, Germany, Hungaria, Finland, Suriname, Serbia, Brazil, England, New Zealand, Poland, Greece, Croatia, Malta and Austria.

From 1993 on, he became involved in the development of new methods in the field of social systems: The Social Panorama. The connection between the pragmatic field of NLP with social psychology has become his major activity over the last decade.

Who is Andrew T. Austin?

Born in 1971, Andrew T. Austin is one of the UK's most sought-after therapist. He runs training courses internationally and still sees clients for one to one sessions in the South of England. With his work heavily influenced by British psychiatrist, R.D. Laing and Chicago based innovator and writer, Charles Faulkner, Andrew T. Austin has innovated a number of therapeutic processes and models including Metaphors of Movement and Integral Eye Movement Therapy.

Austin used to work as a nurse having worked in Accident and Emergency, cardiac surgery and neurosurgery, having worked primarily at Southampton General Hospital.

The author of the best selling book, "The Rainbow Machine - Tales from a Neurolinguist's Journal" Andrew T. Austin is known for his quirky and often controversial style, good looks and no-nonsense attitude.

I’m looking forward to learning more about this. I would especially like to know how this relates (or doesn’t ) to I,Me,Self and You and the Self Concept work of Steven Andreas (in his book Transforming Your Self). I bought the IEMT DVD’s and have used a bit of the I,Me,Self and You distinctions, however, finding where they are appropriate, measuring any change with them and integrating into the rest of the work is still a challenge. Perhaps this material will help with that? I am very interested in Identity level change so I look forward to seeing more here….

The Practitioners, Masters or Trainers following what worldwide happen in the field of NLP, know the special Art each of this two Artist’s has developed. I will describe the Patterns, Knowledge, Tools or Art Lucas represents for 20 years now, as a extreme useful and extended modeling tool – or mapping tool. Modeling or mapping how the social world is represented in every client. Mapping also the sub-modalities and finding a starting point for every intervention. This is much more useful with e.g. psychiatric patients, then just a simple chance of state for some hours and then they go back to the old trail again, until next session.
The Metaphor of Movement developed by Andrew T. – after my humble opinion, also an really excellent tool to map the language patterns of the clients and hear, how is the world represented inside the clients head, also here the sub-modalities are the key.

The combination of the work and Art of this two excellent people for me can give us a visual and auditiv broad range of the representations of each client or student, we never have experienced in NLP ever. An extended social Panorama of each person. In modeling a forgotten issue, whilst the focus is on excellent behavior. But how is this human being represented inside others in this particular part of the society – and the other way around: how is all of this represented inside this one person or client? A combination of authorities, family members and all the strangers whilst shopping downtown, in a concert or open space, perhaps getting frighten…? Submodalities, metaphors… ?

I really happy and deeply grateful about this material provided here on this site to a fair prize – compared to the valuable tool I get as a
NLP MasterTrainer. I hope I can invite this guys soon to our NLP Academy, next time they are in the northern part of Europe. Lucas is also this year in the Monastery in Abano Therme, Italy again – Lovely, but way too much german to me, so here is the place Bob Janes and all of you reading this right now.